Princess Biscuits

You might have guessed by now that I love to bake.  I enjoy all sorts of baking and often try to challenge myself with something new (I have been in training for the Bake Off for about a million years - I hope they pick me one day!).  Joining the WI recently has given me more reasons to bake and more people to eat my baked goods - there's only so much a family of four can get through, especially when one of the four is only 10 months old!

I have to confess that I have never been very good as biscuits.  I am getting better but apologies to anyone who has had to eat one of my not-so-great attempts over the years.  I have discovered that the secret of a good biscuit is all in the rolling out.  Usually the thinner the better, depending on the type of biscuit you are making. Oh and getting them out of the oven before they get too brown - usually only a little colour is perfect, even if you think they might be undercooked. 

Anyway, years ago, on a trip to New York, I bought this lovely set of cookie cutters:

As you can see, it contains a shoe, a crown and a dress but there are others in the set too including sun glasses and a hat.  I loved it as soon as I saw it but apart from making the occasional biscuit for a hen night, I haven't really used it very much.  This weekend, Puckeridge WI were in charge of the kitchen at a local craft fair, so I thought I'd get this set out and make some biscuits aimed at the young ones.  I opted to make a batch of princess crowns.  I used a Mary Berry recipe from her Baking Bible to make a simple biscuit dough with a vanilla flavour.

At the beginning of May, Puckeridge WI had a stall at the Standon May Fair (you can read about it here) where I made some spotty teapot biscuits to give out to passers-by.  To ice those biscuits I used roll out icing for the background colour then royal icing for the spots.  It was a bit time consuming and I wasn't completely convinced by the finish, so I decided that this time I would take a slightly different approach.  I have long been a fan of The Biscuiteers and follow them on Twitter, so when they released this video, I watched it to find out how they make their biscuits so pretty...



Learn to ice a Father's Day biscuit! from Cassie Merrick on Vimeo.

Lovely biscuits and a lovely shop (or boutique as it is called). I've already started dropping hints to Mr Birks about going to one of their icing workshops... 

Anyway, with this in mind I started out by icing an outline onto my biscuits using a slightly thicker royal icing mix.  I am lucky, in that I got given an icing gun for my birthday, so it makes icing much easier to control.  My first few attempts were, admittedly, a bit wobbly but I got the hang of it quite quickly and the outlines were quite quick to do.

You'll see in the pictures that I managed to get icing everywhere in the process!  Step 2 was to fill in the outline with a slightly runnier icing.  I'm not sure what recipe The Biscuiteers use for their icing but I don't think mine was quite right.  However, I managed to do this part without too many problems.  I found that I had to spread the icing with a cocktail stick to get it to fill every part of the outline and so this meant one biscuit at a time (also time consuming).  The finish on each one could have been a bit more even I think and maybe I should have gone for a darker yellow to create more of a contrast.  Anyway, here's stage two:

Finally, I iced on a different colour, again in a slightly thicker icing.  On the video, their contrasting colour sunk down into the bottom layer of icing but mine didn't, so again, I don't think my mixtures were quite right.  However, the main problem here was that I couldn't decide what pattern to go for and found myself a bit stuck.  In hindsight, I should have taken more inspiration from the cookie cutter box and also used a smaller piping nozzle so I could give more detail.  Anyway, I was quite pleased with the final result and learnt a lot through the process.  They also tasted very good!